Gay Scholar Warns Against Reading Into U.S. Census Redaction of LGBT Categories

Gary Gates urges against reading into LGBT redaction from the U.S. Census. Washington Blade photo by Michael Key

A leading gay scholar of U.S. LGBT demographics is warning LGBT rights supporters against reading too much into the U.S. Census Bureau’s removal of proposed LGBT categories, saying the media reports on the development are incorrect.
Gary Gates, a former research fellow at the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, made the remarks on Twitter after a firestorm erupted over the U.S. Census Bureau initially proposing LGBT categories for federal surveys in a report to Congress only to remove them later in the day on the basis they were “inadvertently” included.

For years, Gates has been a leading scholar on LGBT demographics, determining the percentage of LGBT people in the United States based on information in the U.S. Census reports. Based on the 2010 U.S. Census data, Gates determined that nearly 3 percent of the U.S. population identifies as lesbian, gay and bisexual.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Census Bureau delivered its report to Congress on the Subjects Planned for the 2020 Census and American Community Survey report. The appendix of the initial report indicated the bureau was proposing questions on sexual orientation and gender identity, but the agency later issued a notice saying those categories were “inadvertently” included and redacted them from the report.
Media outlets reported the move as the erasure from the U.S. Census of questions seeking to identify LGBT people, even though the survey has never included LGBT questions. LGBT advocates, who had been pushing for the inclusion of LGBT questions in the more detailed annual American Community Survey, denounced the redaction as an attack from the Trump administration.
The Washington Blade has placed a request with the U.S. Census Bureau seeking comment on why the categories were included in the first place, the reasoning for the removal and whether the redaction definitively rules out the inclusion of LGBT questions in future surveys.